Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

allowing 'if'-infinitives:
(11) a. No sé si anar-hi (Catalan)
Not know-I if to-go-there
b. No sé si hacerlo (Spanish)
Not know-I if to-do-it
c. *Sabi pas se hi anar (Occitan)
Know-I not if there-to-go
d. *No'isco si andare (Sardinian)
Not know-I if to-go
e. *I don't know if to go (English)
Kayne's analysis of these facts accounts for both the (im)possibility of 'if'-infinitives and
the enclisis phenomenon. Concerning the latter, he assumes that clitic attachment is (at least in
Romance) left-adjunction to a functional head, for principled reasons having to do with
morphological headedness. Therefore, whenever a clitic is strictly left-adjacent to the verb, the
structure would be:
(12) [ I o cl [ I o V o ] ]
where I o is some functional (inflectional) head. In fact, the general condition Kayne imposes on
clitic attachment is that clitics must attach to a functional head, whether it contains the moved V o
or is silent. However, he follows Baker (1985) in assuming that the head the clitic adjoins to
cannot contain a trace. A consequence of this assumption would be that, since verb movement is
cyclic for principled reasons, the clitic cannot adjoin to a functional head lower than the one
where V o has moved, because this would imply that the clitic is adjoined to a head containing a
trace:
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